Vorlesungen, Tagungen, Workshops

Workshop Indigeneity: Career and
appropriation(s) of a global category

Freitag, 02.10.2009,
17.15 bis 19.00 Uhr / Raum 454 (Hauptgebäude)

German Anthropological
Association, RG Africa

Indigeneity: Career
and appropriation(s) of a global category

In the history of anthropology, the concept of indigeneity
was most often used to mark the opposition between ‘us’ and ‘them’: the
indigenous, natives to the soil and caught up in their local cultures, were
opposed to the civilized, more cosmopolitan high cultures of the West or, more
rarely, of local elites.

In the last decades, the concept has taken on a
new turn. It is detached from the notion of inferiority and connected to a
special status and special claims linked to autochthony.

In the last decade we observe a new rise of discourses
on indigeneity, above all led by local actors but also promoted by scholars,
triggering new debates (Cultural Anthropology, 21, 2001; Social Anthropology,
14, 2006). The contexts of these discourses are quite diverse. They often involve
political struggles of local groups for entitlements and political
representation, perceived as only partially guaranteed by the respective
national constitution and policies. In many cases, indigeneity is linked to
strategies of so called Cultural Defence of minorities in legal cases. Finally,
there are international discourse coalitions of NGOs, human rights activists
and scholars promoting the cause of endangered peoples, local languages and
cultures in these terms. Within regional anthropological traditions, there are,
however, startling differences with regard to the public and scholarly uses of
the concept. From the Africanist perspective, we witness discourses featuring a
“new nativism” (Mbembe), and there are successful movements to obtain
guaranteed land titles (Botswana) or shares from the
commercialisation of medical plants (Namibia) linked to the promotion of indigenous
rights. In these cases, the concept is used to remedy wrongs committed against
minority groups. On the other hand, rhetorics of exclusion, primarily based on
“autochthony” principles (a dominant notion above all in West Africa) are gaining ground, sometimes even
sustained by national laws. So while indigeneity can be used by minorities in
an emancipatory way to claim their rights, it takes on an oppressive and
exclusive character if used by a majority group. Clearly, the political
problems of both cases go hand in hand with the conceptual ones: the
categorical difference between ‘autochthonous’ and strangers (often themselves
born in a country) can only be established by the political act of focusing on
(often invented) origins, and by fixing fluid identities in a clear ascription
of indigeneity.

The workshop discusses the usefulness and
pitfalls of the concept, promotes the discussion of comparative case studies also
beyond Africa with respect to various local
understandings and cultural constructions of indigeneity, strategies of local
actors, but also legal contexts and political frameworks. Finally, we may
discuss whether alternative concepts can be developed that both meet scholarly
standards and comprise universal human rights standards, or whether the political
ascription of rights based on such group differences is doomed to become
oppressive.

Convenors: Gregor Dobler, Tilo Grätz

Discussant: Alan Barnard

Indigeneity: Career and appropriation(s) of a
global category

Chair: Tilo Grätz, Gregor Dobler

Papers:

David
Picard, Leeds

Indigenousness and the ModernState: The Formation of Cultural
Primordialisms in a CreoleIsland Context

Olaf
Zenker, Bern

Autochthony,
indigeneity and nationalism: time-honouring and state-oriented modes of rooting
individual-territory-group-triads in a globalising world

Gregor
Dobler, Basel

A White Traditional
Authority? Afrikaner claims in Southern Africa and the conundrums of indigeneity

Tilo Grätz, Hamburg/Halle

Political
emancipation, Cultural entrepreneurship, revivalism. Reflexions on the concept
of “Indigenous Media”, with a case study from Benin (West Africa)

Alan Barnard, Edinburgh

Discussant

Dr David Picard (Leeds)

d.picard@leedsmet.ac.uk

Indigenousness and the ModernState: The Formation of Cultural Primordialisms
in a CreoleIsland Context

In this paper, I will reflect upon the role of
indigenousness in the constitution of modern states or ‘modern stateliness’. I
am particularly interested here in examining the relation between historical
events of marginalisation and extermination of indigenous people and more
recent efforts to encourage descendants of surviving indigenous people to
re-emancipate and refashion indigenous identities. Tourism, cultural
conservation lobbies, universities and museums seem key institutions in these
recent emancipation movements. Considering that forms of marginalisation and
extermination of indigenous people can be related to the foundational moments
of many modern states (or that moment retrospectively considered as foundational),
I propose to approach the relation between these events and the recent public
re-emancipation and re-fashioning of indigenous people through the classical
anthropological concept of sacrifice. Specifically, I will discuss whether the
observation of recent forms of reification and self-promotion of indigenous
people can be understood as part of the modern state ceremonial, of a culture
and model of governance that needs ‘indigenousness’ as an unconditional
reference to re-invoke its foundational moments and recreate its own political
magic. To ground my argument, I will use ethnohistoric and ethnographic data
from the island of La Reunion, Indian Ocean as well as cases from the academic
literature.

time-honouring and state-oriented modes of
rooting individual-territory-group-triads in a globalising world

Recently, it has become standard to note the
resurgence of local identities, vernacular forms of autochthonous exclusions as
well as the return of the ‘native’ in the shape of ‘indigenous peoples’ as the
flip-side of globalisation. The contradictory expansions of modernity thereby
produce an accelerated desire for interconnecting individuals, groups and
‘their’ territories and for firmly rooting such triads in global space. Against
this backdrop, it is astonishing that two crucial bodies of research – studies
of nationalism, on the one hand, and of autochthony, on the other – hardly
engage with each other conceptually and instead provide rather contradictory
accounts as to how identity formations of individuals and groups literally
‘take place’: within studies of nationalism, it is typically the ‘non-ethnic’
(‘the civic’) that is associated with territory through place of birth and/or
residence (the ‘ethnic’ being mainly linked to descent and culture), whereas in
research on autochthony, it is usually the ‘ethnic’ that legitimises privileged
access to territory through ‘first-comer claims’ rooted in the past. This paper
argues for a synthesis of insights from both fields by conceptualising
‘autochthony’ – i.e. the proclaimed ‘original’ link between individual, territory
and group – as the root phenomenon. It suggests distinguishing between two
causal logics underlying the reproduction of this autochthony-triad, which
honour time in different ways: ‘individualised autochthony’ links the
individual, territory and group in such a way that shared culture and/or
descent ultimately follow from place of birth and/or residence within the same
present, while ‘collectivised autochthony’ inverts this causality on the basis
of continuously evoking the same past. Based on this notion of autochthony – de facto a model of (landed) ethnicity
–, the paper proposes to distinguish between ‘indigeneity’ and ‘nationalism’ as
alternative modes of targeting the state: whereas indigeneity refers to cases
of autochthony that, in compensation for past discriminations, demand special
entitlements from the state,
nationalism denotes cases of autochthony that aim for the very entitlement of the state itself.

A White Traditional Authority? Afrikaner claims
in Southern
Africa and
the conundrums of indigeneity

In Namibia and South Africa, white Afrikaans speakers have
repeatedly claimed the establishment of an Afrikaner Traditional Authority and
thus to bring the descendants of colonial settlers on equal legal footing with
the descendants of the colonized. The group that, under apartheid, tried to
cement a distinction between themselves as ‘civilized’ on the one hand,
‘tribal’ Africans on the other should be marked as indigenous in the same way
as those formerly called ‘Natives’. The Afrikaner claim lays open the paradoxes
of the concept of indigeneity as a political instrument and its double
character – as a resource to gain a legitimate means of access to the resources
of state power, and as an expression of identity. This double face of
instrumental and expressive connotations makes the concept as powerful as
potentially dangerous. By using it for political aims, people express
assumptions about the relation between citizens and the state, assumptions
which have been in the centre of many scholarly analyses of African societies.
The presentation will use the Afrikaner case to unravel some of the societal
and political preconditions of the successful use of indigeneity, and look at
the common points between ‘emancipative’ and ‘exclusivist’ uses of indigeneity/
autochthony.

My paper examines the concept of Indigenous
Media that gained much prominence in media anthropology and development
cooperation. Referring to debates on the notion of the “indigenous”, I will
discuss to which extent the concept is appropriate, and will point to some
ambivalences it entails when comparing diverse case studies. Assessing an
example of a Community radio station in Benin (Radio Ilema), I will propose a
different analytical frame, focussing on the set of actors, their often
diverging agendas as well as modes of technological appropriation.